http://informahealthcare.com/jmh ISSN: 0963-8237 (print), 1360-0567 (electronic) J Ment Health, 2014; 23(4): 159–161 ! 2014 Informa UK Ltd. DOI: 10.3109/09638237.2014.928404
EDITORIAL
Positive psychology, utilitarianism and the pursuit of happiness
Any mental health professional must be primarily concerned with the service user’s life – their health is the most important factor. Most of us recognise that there are occasions when people are a danger to their own or others’ lives and therefore have to be restrained, but most of us, surely, would wish to keep compulsory treatment to a minimum, regarding liberty as the second most important factor. The pursuit of happiness comes a poor third, and is occasionally in danger of being forgotten. It is important to note therefore, that socially exclusive assumptions about the emotional capabilities of people with mental disorders are not borne out by the facts: psychosis does not appear to prevent individuals from experiencing happiness (Mankiewicz et al., 2013), although depression obviously does and people with moderate to severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have been shown to have lower levels of happiness than people with other mental disorders (Karantzias et al., 2013). People with bipolar disorder, by definition, can experience intense happiness (Russell & Moss, 2013). There is a significant relationship between IQ and happiness (Ali et al., 2013) but people with learning disabilities are quite clearly capable of having fun. People with such severe dementia that they can no longer communicate in words can still get pleasure from music (Weeks, 2011). Seligman (2002) suggested that happiness can be achieved via the pleasant life, the engaged life or the meaningful life. All three of these can present difficulties for people with long-term mental health problems, but by and large, people with mental disorders can be shown to be capable of experiencing happiness. Given that people with mental disorders and disabilities are capable of experiencing happiness, and accepting that the pursuit of happiness is, following after life and liberty, an ‘‘inalienable right’’ (US Declaration of Independence, 1776), one would expect that a journal whose title expresses an interest in ‘‘mental health’’ rather than in mental illness, would overflow with papers related to happiness. In fact however, a cursory search in this journal brought up 98 uses of the word ‘‘happiness’’ – many of only marginal relevance, as compared with 299 hits on ‘‘suicide,’’ most of them grimly relevant (sampled April 2014). We have published papers on well-being (e.g. Lal et al., 2014), we have looked at the ways in which people have found benefit through their struggle with adversity (e.g. Chiba et al., 2014) and we have published the occasional book review (e.g. Carson, 2013) but that is about all. Clearly the contributors to the Journal of Mental Health do not regard their clients’ happiness as a major topic of research interest.
Happiness is an elusive concept. Most philosophers have agreed that happiness is an important part of human life, but have disagreed wildly on exactly what it is (Pawelski, 2013). Aristotle held that ‘‘the activity of the divine which surpasses all others must be contemplative’’ and that of all human beings the philosopher who ‘‘exercises his reason and cultivates it’’ must be the most godlike and therefore must be the happiest (Nicomachean Ethics l1179). Those of us who have had the opportunity to observe modern philosophers in the flesh may be permitted to doubt Aristotle’s conclusion, and it is hard to see Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer or Carlyle as happy people (Samuel Butler said that it was very good of God to let the Carlyles marry eachother, because that only made two people unhappy instead of four. Letters 1884). Paradoxically, the nineteenth-century British Utilitarians were a noticeably joyless bunch (Guha, 2014): John Stuart Mill By a great effort of will Forgot his natural bonhomie And wrote the Principles of Political Economy in spite of holding that an action is morally right if it has consequences which lead to happiness and wrong if it brings about the reverse, so society should aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. (This theory, as has been pointed out on various occasions, could logically be extended to justify murder: if five people are unhappily in need of organ transplants then sentencing one person to an unhappy death for spare parts would increase the happiness of the greater number.) Psychology, as it became a separate discipline from philosophy, rapidly came to focus on the abnormal and the disordered individual, though Freud in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) well understood the role of law and community in restricting and controlling the pleasure principle to create a focus for happiness. Positive psychology, a sub-discipline designed to ‘‘make normal life more fulfilling’’ (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) is a recent development. In his foreword to the Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology (Lopez, 2009), Seligman makes the interesting suggestion that ‘‘when nations are at war, in famine, poor and in civil turmoil it is quite natural that the endeavours they support will be about defence and damage. When nations are . . . peaceful, sated, wealthy and harmonious they ask, not just about removing the disabling conditions of life but about creating and ennobling conditions of life. Cosimo the Great’s
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Florence decided to devote its surplus to beauty and gave us what was later called ‘The Renaissance’. The wealthy world of the late twentieth century met these conditions, and the call for . . . a psychology which was not just about suffering, trauma, depression, victims, irrationality, madness and crime did not fall on deaf ears.’’ It is hard to see George W. Bush as a latter-day Cosimo de Medici, or The Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology as the modern equivalent of the Uffizi Gallery, but the comparison which can be made with the Utilitarians is interesting – utilitarianism, as a ‘‘positive philosophy’’ arose in a time of profound peace when Britain was the richest and most powerful nation in the world. Future generations may look back on the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the financial crisis of 2008 as a similar period when a ‘‘positive psychology’’ could arise in the world’s richest and most powerful nation (Guha, 2009). If Seligman was correct, then a period of prolonged financial recession, local wars, and social instability caused by climate change should swing psychologists back to a focus on suffering, trauma, depression, victims, irrationality, madness and crime. Mental health practitioners tend to have a belief in equality (Guha, in press; Mihapoulos et al., 2013; Mond, 2012). This instinctive belief is supported by an increasing body of evidence which suggests, not merely that people are happy in more egalitarian societies but also that the general incidence of disorder is lower in happier societies (Diener & Chan, 2011; Equalities Review, 2007; Jane-Llopis et al., 2014). Economists tend to measure a country’s success by its gross national product (GNP) but the philosophical view that GNP is not a measure of health or happiness has increasingly been accepted by farsighted politicians – back in 1968 Robert Kennedy said ‘‘GNP . . . measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile’’ (http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/Robert-f-kennedy sampled April 2014) and more recently even the most inegalitarian of modern British prime ministers brought himself to say that ‘‘We should be thinking not just what is good for putting money in people’s pockets but what is good for putting joy in people’s hearts,’’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/ happiness_formula/4809828.stm). Just in strict GNP terms however, mental disorder costs money. In the United Kingdom, mental health-care costs may have amounted to over £77 billion per annum and the estimated bill for medically-related absenteeism and presenteeism (people turning up in spite of being unfit) is another £26 billion (Cooper, 2014). Resources available for mental health care are scarce, necessitating tough decisions about how to allocate them (Patel, 2013). If, as the evidence seems to suggest, it is true that people are happier in more egalitarian societies and that people who are happy are less likely to suffer from mental disorders, then there is a strong argument, on pure GNP grounds, for all mental health workers to do their best to work for a more egalitarian society, and to do what they can to actively increase their clients’ happiness. Early policy-makers seem to have been more aware of this than our present political masters. The 19th-century asylums were designed with large gardens which patients were encouraged to work in, and sizeable libraries that patients were encouraged to read in. Dishing out anti-depressants in graffiti-covered portakabin
J Ment Health, 2014; 23(4): 159–161
outside a closed public library may be a way of alleviating mental ill-health, but is by no means conducive to the encouragement of mental health – of the fostering of liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Guha, 2012) There is a strong preference among health economists and policy makers for economic evaluations to measure mental health outcomes (Byford, 2013). Attempts are being made to produce an equivalently statistically valid way of measuring happiness (White, 2013). This can be difficult because the indicators of happiness change over time. In 1938 ‘‘Worktown’’ (Bolton) religion was rated the third most important of ten indicators of what made people happy (Gazeley & Langhammer, 2013). Recent replications of this work in Bolton show that religion is now the least important factor (Carson & McHugh, 2014). Even without specific measures however, the path we should be taking seems clear. There was apparently, some discussion before Jefferson’s final wording in the Declaration of Independence was accepted: none of us can clearly define happiness, or can guarantee that any particular situation will make us happy, but looking for it – the ‘‘pursuit’’ of happiness is perfectly understandable as an inalienable right. People suffering from mental disorders appear, on the face of the evidence, to have in varying degrees, the ability to be happy. Mental health professionals should be doing what they can to help their service users in this, including investigating interventions that can be disseminated directly to individuals, allowing them to pursue greater levels of happiness (Schueller & Parks, 2014). Perhaps, a future search for ‘‘happiness’’ in the Journal of Mental Health will bring up a larger range of hits than the present paltry display. Martin Guha, King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK E-mail: [email protected] Jerome Carson, Psychology Department, Bolton University, Bolton, UK
References Ali A, Ambler G, Strydorn A, et al. (2013). The relationship between happiness and intelligence quotient. Psychol Med, 43, 1303–12. Butler S. (1884). Letter to Eliza Savage, reprinted in Jones HF 1920. Samuel Butler: A memoir. London: Macmillan. Byford S. (2013). The validity and responsiveness of the EQ-5D measure of health-related quality of life in an adolescent population with persistent major depression. J Mental Health, 22, 101–10. Carson J. (2013). Review – The world book of happiness. J Mental Health, 22, 295–6. Carson J, McHugh S. (2014). Happiness and wellbeing: Emerging lessons from social science. Paper given at Health & Wellbeing Conference, University of Bolton, 11 April 2014. Chiba R, Miyamoto Y, Funakoshi A. (2014). The concept of ‘‘benefit finding’’ for people at different stages of recovery from mental illness. J Mental Health, 23, 20–4. Cooper CL. (2014). Introduction wellbeing: A complete reference guide, vol. 1. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Diener E, Chan MY. (2011). Happy people live longer. Appl Psychol, Health Well-being, 3, 1–43. Equalities Review. (2007). Fairness and Freedom: Final report of the Equalities Review. London: Equalities Review.
DOI: 10.3109/09638237.2014.928404
Freud S. (1930). Civilization and its discontentstranslation, reprinted Harmondsworth, Penguin; 2002. Gazeley I, Langhammer C. (2013). The meanings of happiness in mass observation’s Bolton. History Workshop J, 75, 159–89. Guha M. (2009). Review: Encyclopedia of positive psychology. Ref Rev, 23, 12–14. Guha M. (2012). Review: Space, place and mental health. J Mental Health, 21, 211–13. Guha M. (2014). Review: Bloomsbury encyclopedia of utilitarianism. Ref Rev, 28, 13–14. Guha M. (in press). Review: Health justice. J Ment Health. Jane-Llopis E, Anderson P, Herrman H. (2014). Mental health and wellbeing at the top of the global agenda. In: Cooper CL, ed. Wellbeing: A Complete Reference Guide. Vol. 6 ch. 18. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 599–610. Karantzias T, Chouliara Z, Power K, et al. (2013). Life satisfaction in people with post-traumatic stress disorder. J Mental Health, 22, 501–8. Lal S, Ungar M, Malla A, et al. (2014). Meanings of well-being from the perspective of youth recently diagnosed with psychosis. J Mental Health, 23, 25–30. Lopez SJ, ed. (2009). Encyclopedia of positive psychology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Mankiewicz PD, Gresswell DM, Turner C. (2013). Happiness in severe mental illness. Mental Health Soc Inclusion, 17, 27–34.
Positive psychology, utilitarianism and happiness
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Mihapoulos C, Carter R, Pirkis J, Vos T. (2013). Priority setting for mental health services. J Mental Health, 22, 122–34. Mond JM. (2012). A voice for all in mental health research. J Ment Health, 21, 1–3. Patel A. (2013). The inevitable pursuit of efficiency. J Ment Health, 22, 89–92. Pawelski JO. (2013). Introduction to philosophical approaches to happiness. In: David SA, Boniwell H, Ayers AC, eds. The Oxford handbook of happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 247–51. Russell L, Moss D. (2013). High and happy? Exploring the experience of positive states of mind in people who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Psychol Psychother, 86, 431–46. Schueller SM, Parks AC. (2014). The science of self-help: Translating positive psychology research into increased individual happiness. European Psychol, 19, 145–55. Seligman MEP. (2002). Authentic happiness. New York: Free Press. Seligman MEP, Csikszentmihalyi M. (2000). Positive psychology. Am Psychol, 55, 5–14. United States. (1776). Declaration of independence. Philadelphia: US Congress. Weeks S. (2011). Connecting through music with people with dementia. J Mental Health, 20, 503. White MD. (2013). The pursuit of a measure of happiness. Rev Soc Econ, 71, 534–9.
EDITORIAL
Positive psychology, utilitarianism and the pursuit of happiness
Any mental health professional must be primarily concerned with the service user’s life – their health is the most important factor. Most of us recognise that there are occasions when people are a danger to their own or others’ lives and therefore have to be restrained, but most of us, surely, would wish to keep compulsory treatment to a minimum, regarding liberty as the second most important factor. The pursuit of happiness comes a poor third, and is occasionally in danger of being forgotten. It is important to note therefore, that socially exclusive assumptions about the emotional capabilities of people with mental disorders are not borne out by the facts: psychosis does not appear to prevent individuals from experiencing happiness (Mankiewicz et al., 2013), although depression obviously does and people with moderate to severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have been shown to have lower levels of happiness than people with other mental disorders (Karantzias et al., 2013). People with bipolar disorder, by definition, can experience intense happiness (Russell & Moss, 2013). There is a significant relationship between IQ and happiness (Ali et al., 2013) but people with learning disabilities are quite clearly capable of having fun. People with such severe dementia that they can no longer communicate in words can still get pleasure from music (Weeks, 2011). Seligman (2002) suggested that happiness can be achieved via the pleasant life, the engaged life or the meaningful life. All three of these can present difficulties for people with long-term mental health problems, but by and large, people with mental disorders can be shown to be capable of experiencing happiness. Given that people with mental disorders and disabilities are capable of experiencing happiness, and accepting that the pursuit of happiness is, following after life and liberty, an ‘‘inalienable right’’ (US Declaration of Independence, 1776), one would expect that a journal whose title expresses an interest in ‘‘mental health’’ rather than in mental illness, would overflow with papers related to happiness. In fact however, a cursory search in this journal brought up 98 uses of the word ‘‘happiness’’ – many of only marginal relevance, as compared with 299 hits on ‘‘suicide,’’ most of them grimly relevant (sampled April 2014). We have published papers on well-being (e.g. Lal et al., 2014), we have looked at the ways in which people have found benefit through their struggle with adversity (e.g. Chiba et al., 2014) and we have published the occasional book review (e.g. Carson, 2013) but that is about all. Clearly the contributors to the Journal of Mental Health do not regard their clients’ happiness as a major topic of research interest.
Happiness is an elusive concept. Most philosophers have agreed that happiness is an important part of human life, but have disagreed wildly on exactly what it is (Pawelski, 2013). Aristotle held that ‘‘the activity of the divine which surpasses all others must be contemplative’’ and that of all human beings the philosopher who ‘‘exercises his reason and cultivates it’’ must be the most godlike and therefore must be the happiest (Nicomachean Ethics l1179). Those of us who have had the opportunity to observe modern philosophers in the flesh may be permitted to doubt Aristotle’s conclusion, and it is hard to see Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer or Carlyle as happy people (Samuel Butler said that it was very good of God to let the Carlyles marry eachother, because that only made two people unhappy instead of four. Letters 1884). Paradoxically, the nineteenth-century British Utilitarians were a noticeably joyless bunch (Guha, 2014): John Stuart Mill By a great effort of will Forgot his natural bonhomie And wrote the Principles of Political Economy in spite of holding that an action is morally right if it has consequences which lead to happiness and wrong if it brings about the reverse, so society should aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. (This theory, as has been pointed out on various occasions, could logically be extended to justify murder: if five people are unhappily in need of organ transplants then sentencing one person to an unhappy death for spare parts would increase the happiness of the greater number.) Psychology, as it became a separate discipline from philosophy, rapidly came to focus on the abnormal and the disordered individual, though Freud in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) well understood the role of law and community in restricting and controlling the pleasure principle to create a focus for happiness. Positive psychology, a sub-discipline designed to ‘‘make normal life more fulfilling’’ (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) is a recent development. In his foreword to the Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology (Lopez, 2009), Seligman makes the interesting suggestion that ‘‘when nations are at war, in famine, poor and in civil turmoil it is quite natural that the endeavours they support will be about defence and damage. When nations are . . . peaceful, sated, wealthy and harmonious they ask, not just about removing the disabling conditions of life but about creating and ennobling conditions of life. Cosimo the Great’s
160
M. Guha & J. Carson
Florence decided to devote its surplus to beauty and gave us what was later called ‘The Renaissance’. The wealthy world of the late twentieth century met these conditions, and the call for . . . a psychology which was not just about suffering, trauma, depression, victims, irrationality, madness and crime did not fall on deaf ears.’’ It is hard to see George W. Bush as a latter-day Cosimo de Medici, or The Encyclopedia of Positive Psychology as the modern equivalent of the Uffizi Gallery, but the comparison which can be made with the Utilitarians is interesting – utilitarianism, as a ‘‘positive philosophy’’ arose in a time of profound peace when Britain was the richest and most powerful nation in the world. Future generations may look back on the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the financial crisis of 2008 as a similar period when a ‘‘positive psychology’’ could arise in the world’s richest and most powerful nation (Guha, 2009). If Seligman was correct, then a period of prolonged financial recession, local wars, and social instability caused by climate change should swing psychologists back to a focus on suffering, trauma, depression, victims, irrationality, madness and crime. Mental health practitioners tend to have a belief in equality (Guha, in press; Mihapoulos et al., 2013; Mond, 2012). This instinctive belief is supported by an increasing body of evidence which suggests, not merely that people are happy in more egalitarian societies but also that the general incidence of disorder is lower in happier societies (Diener & Chan, 2011; Equalities Review, 2007; Jane-Llopis et al., 2014). Economists tend to measure a country’s success by its gross national product (GNP) but the philosophical view that GNP is not a measure of health or happiness has increasingly been accepted by farsighted politicians – back in 1968 Robert Kennedy said ‘‘GNP . . . measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile’’ (http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/Robert-f-kennedy sampled April 2014) and more recently even the most inegalitarian of modern British prime ministers brought himself to say that ‘‘We should be thinking not just what is good for putting money in people’s pockets but what is good for putting joy in people’s hearts,’’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/ happiness_formula/4809828.stm). Just in strict GNP terms however, mental disorder costs money. In the United Kingdom, mental health-care costs may have amounted to over £77 billion per annum and the estimated bill for medically-related absenteeism and presenteeism (people turning up in spite of being unfit) is another £26 billion (Cooper, 2014). Resources available for mental health care are scarce, necessitating tough decisions about how to allocate them (Patel, 2013). If, as the evidence seems to suggest, it is true that people are happier in more egalitarian societies and that people who are happy are less likely to suffer from mental disorders, then there is a strong argument, on pure GNP grounds, for all mental health workers to do their best to work for a more egalitarian society, and to do what they can to actively increase their clients’ happiness. Early policy-makers seem to have been more aware of this than our present political masters. The 19th-century asylums were designed with large gardens which patients were encouraged to work in, and sizeable libraries that patients were encouraged to read in. Dishing out anti-depressants in graffiti-covered portakabin
J Ment Health, 2014; 23(4): 159–161
outside a closed public library may be a way of alleviating mental ill-health, but is by no means conducive to the encouragement of mental health – of the fostering of liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Guha, 2012) There is a strong preference among health economists and policy makers for economic evaluations to measure mental health outcomes (Byford, 2013). Attempts are being made to produce an equivalently statistically valid way of measuring happiness (White, 2013). This can be difficult because the indicators of happiness change over time. In 1938 ‘‘Worktown’’ (Bolton) religion was rated the third most important of ten indicators of what made people happy (Gazeley & Langhammer, 2013). Recent replications of this work in Bolton show that religion is now the least important factor (Carson & McHugh, 2014). Even without specific measures however, the path we should be taking seems clear. There was apparently, some discussion before Jefferson’s final wording in the Declaration of Independence was accepted: none of us can clearly define happiness, or can guarantee that any particular situation will make us happy, but looking for it – the ‘‘pursuit’’ of happiness is perfectly understandable as an inalienable right. People suffering from mental disorders appear, on the face of the evidence, to have in varying degrees, the ability to be happy. Mental health professionals should be doing what they can to help their service users in this, including investigating interventions that can be disseminated directly to individuals, allowing them to pursue greater levels of happiness (Schueller & Parks, 2014). Perhaps, a future search for ‘‘happiness’’ in the Journal of Mental Health will bring up a larger range of hits than the present paltry display. Martin Guha, King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK E-mail: [email protected] Jerome Carson, Psychology Department, Bolton University, Bolton, UK
References Ali A, Ambler G, Strydorn A, et al. (2013). The relationship between happiness and intelligence quotient. Psychol Med, 43, 1303–12. Butler S. (1884). Letter to Eliza Savage, reprinted in Jones HF 1920. Samuel Butler: A memoir. London: Macmillan. Byford S. (2013). The validity and responsiveness of the EQ-5D measure of health-related quality of life in an adolescent population with persistent major depression. J Mental Health, 22, 101–10. Carson J. (2013). Review – The world book of happiness. J Mental Health, 22, 295–6. Carson J, McHugh S. (2014). Happiness and wellbeing: Emerging lessons from social science. Paper given at Health & Wellbeing Conference, University of Bolton, 11 April 2014. Chiba R, Miyamoto Y, Funakoshi A. (2014). The concept of ‘‘benefit finding’’ for people at different stages of recovery from mental illness. J Mental Health, 23, 20–4. Cooper CL. (2014). Introduction wellbeing: A complete reference guide, vol. 1. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Diener E, Chan MY. (2011). Happy people live longer. Appl Psychol, Health Well-being, 3, 1–43. Equalities Review. (2007). Fairness and Freedom: Final report of the Equalities Review. London: Equalities Review.
DOI: 10.3109/09638237.2014.928404
Freud S. (1930). Civilization and its discontentstranslation, reprinted Harmondsworth, Penguin; 2002. Gazeley I, Langhammer C. (2013). The meanings of happiness in mass observation’s Bolton. History Workshop J, 75, 159–89. Guha M. (2009). Review: Encyclopedia of positive psychology. Ref Rev, 23, 12–14. Guha M. (2012). Review: Space, place and mental health. J Mental Health, 21, 211–13. Guha M. (2014). Review: Bloomsbury encyclopedia of utilitarianism. Ref Rev, 28, 13–14. Guha M. (in press). Review: Health justice. J Ment Health. Jane-Llopis E, Anderson P, Herrman H. (2014). Mental health and wellbeing at the top of the global agenda. In: Cooper CL, ed. Wellbeing: A Complete Reference Guide. Vol. 6 ch. 18. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 599–610. Karantzias T, Chouliara Z, Power K, et al. (2013). Life satisfaction in people with post-traumatic stress disorder. J Mental Health, 22, 501–8. Lal S, Ungar M, Malla A, et al. (2014). Meanings of well-being from the perspective of youth recently diagnosed with psychosis. J Mental Health, 23, 25–30. Lopez SJ, ed. (2009). Encyclopedia of positive psychology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Mankiewicz PD, Gresswell DM, Turner C. (2013). Happiness in severe mental illness. Mental Health Soc Inclusion, 17, 27–34.
Positive psychology, utilitarianism and happiness
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Mihapoulos C, Carter R, Pirkis J, Vos T. (2013). Priority setting for mental health services. J Mental Health, 22, 122–34. Mond JM. (2012). A voice for all in mental health research. J Ment Health, 21, 1–3. Patel A. (2013). The inevitable pursuit of efficiency. J Ment Health, 22, 89–92. Pawelski JO. (2013). Introduction to philosophical approaches to happiness. In: David SA, Boniwell H, Ayers AC, eds. The Oxford handbook of happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 247–51. Russell L, Moss D. (2013). High and happy? Exploring the experience of positive states of mind in people who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Psychol Psychother, 86, 431–46. Schueller SM, Parks AC. (2014). The science of self-help: Translating positive psychology research into increased individual happiness. European Psychol, 19, 145–55. Seligman MEP. (2002). Authentic happiness. New York: Free Press. Seligman MEP, Csikszentmihalyi M. (2000). Positive psychology. Am Psychol, 55, 5–14. United States. (1776). Declaration of independence. Philadelphia: US Congress. Weeks S. (2011). Connecting through music with people with dementia. J Mental Health, 20, 503. White MD. (2013). The pursuit of a measure of happiness. Rev Soc Econ, 71, 534–9.
